Saturday, February 04, 2006

Wonderful world of PBwiki

I love the implementation of online tools that help us all get organized. The Wiki is the new collaboration tool that is easy to use and very functional. I have been evaluating wiki's for work and personal use and found many good options. Both hosted and do it yourself models are available from Free to industrial strength versions of pricing. For my personal use, I want a hosted solution that is not too limiting on page allocation (a la Jotspot) and has all the functionality of a collaboration tool. I saw PBwiki while looking at options a few months ago. At that time I did not try it because it was either not ready for prime time, or I just missed the boat. In any event I wanted to see what they have to offer, so I set up my free account in the amount of time it took to change the channel on the telly to Fox Soccer Channel.

The set up was easy and once I clicked the magic link on the confirmation email I was up and running. This lightweight looking wiki sure packs enough features under the hood to make a fan of PBwiki soon enough. I was able to add pages using the usual Wiki syntax and all the features were available to me that I was looking for:

RSS

Easy formatting (WYSIWYG would be nice, but at least I can edit in any browser -unlike Jot)

Backup - You can download your wiki as a zip file (nice feature)

No MAXIMUM PAGE LIMIT for free account

Simple look that can be customisable (3 templates are available for free users)

Good Search function - this one has an auto create link if the search phrase is not found

Index or sidebar - Did a quick serch of the FAQ to get it up

Good support - FAQ and Wiki explain it all

PBwiki satisfied all my request's in a simple little package. The interface is appealing and easy to use, no page limits and you can even upload files and pictures with a limit of 10 MB for free accounts. They offer a premium option which offers more disk space for files and additional features. You can take the PBwiki tour here.